TLS Review of Sleath’s Orphan of the Rhine

I’m gratified to be able to report the Times Literary Supplement has published a review of Valancourt Press’s edition of once the most rare of the Northanger Abbey gothics, Eleanor Sleath’s Orphan of the Rhine; where I come in for praise for my introduction. I quote from part of Julie Peakman’s review (TLS, October 9, 2015, p 26)

Little was known about the author until recently, except for an incorrect suggestion by Michael Sadleir that she was a Roman Catholic, based purely on the Catholic sentiment in her writings. Recent research by Becky Czlapinski and Eric C. Wheeler has discredited the idea; she was in fact a Protestant, born Eleanor Carter (1770-1847), lived in Leicestershire. and married at twenty-one. Her husband. a military doctor called Joseph Barnabas Sleath, died four weeks after the death of her first child in 1794. leaving her bereft and in debt.

Peakman retells of Eleanor’s liaison with an already married clegyman, John Dudley, and how it connects to “a creative period for her:”: between 1809 and 1811, she published The Bristol Heiress, The Nocturnal Minstrel and Pyrenean Banditti. She married Dudley in 1823 after the death of his wife. After recounting the stereotypical gothic elements of the story, Peakman goes on to highlight some of the novel’s strongest features:

Sleath describes the wildness of the natural Iandscape, with its rugged rocks and dark, horrifying forests, in detail. The moon is ever-present as the mists waft over the darkened skies, and mysterious spectres glide through unlit corridors.

She makes the mistake of seeing the back-stories as secondary to the book. To quote from my introduction:

Large swathes of Sleath’s novel are given over to tranquil stories of Madame Chamont who we first meet as Julie de Rubiné (an allusion to Mackenzie’s novel Julia da Roubigné), as a mother nurturing and educating a boy, Enrico de Montferrat, and girl baby, Laurette whose true parentage are learned at the book’s close. This boy and girl emerge as the ostensible central pair of characters who experience a Longus-like Daphnis and Chloe (Greek, 2nd century romance) semi-incestuous erotic childhood that becomes a shared adolescent love … Some of its paradigms do recall particular obsessions in Radcliffe: e.g, the dark father-lover who seeks to murder his daughter-niece and worldly callous aunt, and a ghost is explained away, but the one character who stays in the narrative from beginning to end is the older woman, the romance’s mother. Madame Chamont stands in for Sleath. The book’s back stories often parallel Madame Chamont’s and project many intense retreats into solitude from the severe calamities of the social world that we find in the main narrative. Gothics lend themselves to psychoanalytical parallels, but it is intriguing to note that, like Madame Chamont, the book’s true central male character is the Conte della Croisse (called LaRoque). Della Croisse is the most carefully delineated complicated male character who Madame Chamont comes upon early in the book, and who keeps turning up at hinge-points in the plot-design, and himself gradually presents a believably mixed personality (amoral with virtuous impulses). Like Madame Chamont, at this point LaRoque seems at a central male (it is he whom she hears being tortured) …

The second half of my introduction tells the story of Eleanor Sleath’s life. The first half (which I quoted from above) is written in academic style and really tells of how the book is mostly misunderstood (it’s not a German horror story but rather Radcliffian – imitating and inspired by Radcliffe) and how the older main characters — a woman and man he mother and the unmarried priest — reflect Sleath’s life. It’s common to think that women in the earlier period lived these chaste obedient dull lives: they wisely hid themselves. She is typical in being widowed young, though the first husband died too quickly to make her endlessly pregnant and leave her with too many children. In this era they did know of contraceptive methods, but often people didn’t use them.

Sleath was part of the same milieu as Austen; since we now know of this life of hers, its events and hiding makes me wonder what we don’t know of Austen’s. Was Austen so closely chaperoned that she never came near any of Sleath’s experiences? probably. Unlike Austen, Sleath was freed by a marriage and widowhood.

Then what probably happened was the woman had a stillborn child by this clergyman out of wedlock (who La Roque is surrogate for) — very dangerous in this period because of what she could have been accused of. Being middle class with connections she was able to hush it up. A dead husband, two dead babies, and an intense love affair. And one result of all this were these books. (Peakman calls the love affair “ill-advised:” by whose criteria?)

My introduction does not say Sleath probably had this stillborn child or very bad miscarriage, only refers to the rumors that she had one and how this hurt her position with her “friends” and broke up the coterie. It’s speculation I can put here.

But Peakman is right that for “a modern-day reader accustomed to a linear narrative,” these may seem a distraction instead of what they are: the core of the novel.

She concludes however that

while the novel is by no means high literature, it makes for good bed-time reading. It is also fun to understand what the eighteenth-century reader was enjoying. This new edition, with an informative foreword by Professor Ellen Moody, is a valuable addition to the modern study of a work formerly all but lost to public view.

I hope this review helps sell The Orphan of the Rhine, and my introduction makes Sleath’s narrative content and the book’s autobiographical context better understood.